Dypha: adding the dimension of time to cell culture

Introduction

The current preclinical drug development pipeline is highly inefficient with 9 out of 10 drugs failing when first tested in humans. Of those failures, between 69% and 81% is due to a lack of efficacy (52-57%) or safety (17-24%), indicating that the predictivity of currently used cell culture and animal models is not high enough.

Limitations of Current Models

While promising human cell culture models have arisen in the last decades (e.g. pluripotent stem cell models, spheroids, organoids), the environment of these models is too simplistic to reach their full potential and to translate certain responses to humans.

Kinetics in Cell Culture

One of the important aspects missing in current cell culture is kinetics: many processes in the human body have response times with resolutions of seconds, minutes, or hours. In standard cell culture, however, such temporal resolution is absent because cell culture medium remains unchanged for typically 1-3 days.

Challenges with Animal Models

For kinetics, scientists turn to animal models with relatively low translational success and high costs.

Alternative Solutions

As an alternative, complex microfluidic setups have been used to enable perfusion in vitro and demonstrated a significant amount of evidence that kinetics can improve the relevance of cell culture models. Despite the evidence, typical cell culture biologists are not taking kinetics into account because the tools to control kinetics in cell culture are too complex.

Our Solution

We solve this problem by starting from what cell culture biologists currently use: a standard well plate. We developed a µFluidic Adaptor that can be clamped on any 96 well plate and completely replaces the fluid in the well homogenously without disturbing the cell culture.

Goals and System Overview

Our goal is to develop a plug-and-play peripheral system that integrates automated fluidics and microscopic readout in a fully controlled environment: the δypha System. The system uses µFluidic Adaptors that can be designed for different applications or well plate formats.